Template:FactionDef

One row per faction (6 rows total: human, undead, dungeon, nature, demon, unfrozen). Carries the structural data the in-game faction record holds — display name, description, biome, signature resource, asset references — plus the SIDs the FactionTranslation sibling joins on.

The bot emits one template invocation at the top of each Data:Faction/<id> page, immediately followed by the Template:FactionTranslation row for the 15 non-English locales. City-name pool entries are not on this page — they emit separately as EntryDef rows of type=FactionCityName (one row per city, see shared/Entry.md and D-025).

Faction laws (the fractionLawsLines skill-tree structure in source JSON) are deferred — that ships when the dedicated FactionLaw work lands. Until then the law tree shape is not surfaced on the wiki.

Schema

{{FactionDef
| id = String (allowed values=human,undead,dungeon,nature,demon,unfrozen)
| name = String
| desc = Wikitext

| icon = String
| icon_faction_laws = String

| biome = String
| resource = String

| name_sid = String
| desc_sid = String

| source_path = String
}}

Field notes

• id is the primary key. Six fixed values; neutral is not a faction here even though FactionDef enum includes it for unit classification — there's no 7_neutral.json source file.
• name / desc carry the resolved English defaults inline. Translations live on FactionTranslation keyed by name_sid / desc_sid. Per HoMM tradition the faction's display name is the town-style name: "Temple", "Necropolis", "Dungeon", "Grove", "Hive", "Schism".
• icon is the asset filename for the standard faction crest (e.g. fraction_human); the source JSON's misspelling is preserved here since it's an asset path, not a normalized concept.
• icon_faction_laws is a separate icon used on the faction-laws panel (e.g. Scroll_Faction_Human). Renamed from JSON's iconFractionLaws.
• biome is the faction's signature terrain (Grass, Deathland, Dirt, Autumn, Lava, Snow). One per faction, all distinct in the 2026-05-03 corpus.
• resource is the faction's signature resource (gemstones, mercury, crystals). Renamed from JSON's resourceName. Distribution: gemstones (human, dungeon), mercury (undead, unfrozen), crystals (nature, demon).
• source_path is the JSON path relative to Core/, useful for audit / diff traceability.

Dropped from source

The source JSON's narrativeDesc field references SIDs of the form <id>_narrative_desc that exist in no language file in the 2026-05-03 corpus. Dead pointer; we drop the field entirely. If a future patch populates the SIDs, we'll add the column back.

Related tables

• FactionTranslation — joined on id = faction_id (1:1) for the 15 non-English locales.
• EntryDef where type='FactionCityName' — joined via subtype LIKE '<faction>_%' to surface this faction's randomization-pool city names.
• Unit — joined via Unit.faction = Faction.id (1:N).